A friend of mine wanted to know why his AMD 939 3800 dual core wasn't pulling it's weight anymore. Well he had a few problems: horrible mobo, every fan had been clogged till it stopped including the motherboard and cpu fans and most fans where burn't up/perm destroyed once cleaned up. Plus the system just didn't seem to have the balls to decode a 1080p x264 w/ surround sound video and 1gb of ram made driving windows itself.
In comes the new parts to the rescue:
Processor: i5-2500K
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Pro3
Ram: 4GB Geil 1866MHz 9-10-9 (temp till his comes in)
Hard Drive (1): 3.5" 2TB Seagate (ripped from an external drive)
Hard Drive (2): 2.5" 64GB Crucial RealSSD SataIII (Running as an Intel Smart Response Technology - Acceleration Drive)
DVD-Rom (1): HP dvd1260
DVD-Rom (2): HP dvd1260
Custom Cooling: Corsair Pump/Block and 240mm rad and fans that I put together as a favor.
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Putting it through it's paces.
When I first assembled this thing it was with a factory Intel Cooler from a 3rd gen K series i5. At 4.2-4.4GHz (target I was shooting for) the temps would get into the high 80s on the cores even without having to prime95. Skip forward to today and they will stay below 50c pretty much no matter what threw at them.
The only thing I am ACTUALLY WORRIED ABOUT is the motherboards power delivery and it's ability or lack there of to dissipate it's heat.
The SMALL single heat-sink on the power delivery is very loosely attached and when first installing the board just lightly touched the heat-sink made it come off whatever it was attached to. It had some sort of spring screws or the like hold it on from the back so it did go back to it's original position without me having to remount anything. The lack of any firmness is not reassuring though.
The first burn test with prime95 and the new cooler had us running 1.248v on the CPU and I could smell the motherboard warming up to extreme temps for its first time. I decided to run a full size AC fan on it to reduce stress on the board.
It took it's lickings so far. I am not going to hand someone an overclocked processor without first finding its lowest voltage for that value and then making sure said voltage is stable.
The motherboard with the large fan on it has endured over 24HRs of prime95. I would not recommend that this board be subjected to torture like this without ample cooling and without being inside the board exchange period.
If this board broke on I would have been able to exchange it immediately at the local Microcenter only a few miles away.
Here are some pictures.
Here is a picture of my building station. This is not my office but more like a spot that I built to just sit in a sun filled room (wall to wall window on the other side) and read the internet. When building computers I usually build them at this station because I have tons of room.
The rest of these pictures are pictures of the board and the cooling system. The final wire management is not done as the final drive arrangement is not done. But you get the jist of it.
In comes the new parts to the rescue:
Processor: i5-2500K
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Pro3
Ram: 4GB Geil 1866MHz 9-10-9 (temp till his comes in)
Hard Drive (1): 3.5" 2TB Seagate (ripped from an external drive)
Hard Drive (2): 2.5" 64GB Crucial RealSSD SataIII (Running as an Intel Smart Response Technology - Acceleration Drive)
DVD-Rom (1): HP dvd1260
DVD-Rom (2): HP dvd1260
Custom Cooling: Corsair Pump/Block and 240mm rad and fans that I put together as a favor.
-------
Putting it through it's paces.
When I first assembled this thing it was with a factory Intel Cooler from a 3rd gen K series i5. At 4.2-4.4GHz (target I was shooting for) the temps would get into the high 80s on the cores even without having to prime95. Skip forward to today and they will stay below 50c pretty much no matter what threw at them.
The only thing I am ACTUALLY WORRIED ABOUT is the motherboards power delivery and it's ability or lack there of to dissipate it's heat.
The SMALL single heat-sink on the power delivery is very loosely attached and when first installing the board just lightly touched the heat-sink made it come off whatever it was attached to. It had some sort of spring screws or the like hold it on from the back so it did go back to it's original position without me having to remount anything. The lack of any firmness is not reassuring though.
The first burn test with prime95 and the new cooler had us running 1.248v on the CPU and I could smell the motherboard warming up to extreme temps for its first time. I decided to run a full size AC fan on it to reduce stress on the board.
It took it's lickings so far. I am not going to hand someone an overclocked processor without first finding its lowest voltage for that value and then making sure said voltage is stable.
The motherboard with the large fan on it has endured over 24HRs of prime95. I would not recommend that this board be subjected to torture like this without ample cooling and without being inside the board exchange period.
If this board broke on I would have been able to exchange it immediately at the local Microcenter only a few miles away.
Here are some pictures.
Here is a picture of my building station. This is not my office but more like a spot that I built to just sit in a sun filled room (wall to wall window on the other side) and read the internet. When building computers I usually build them at this station because I have tons of room.
The rest of these pictures are pictures of the board and the cooling system. The final wire management is not done as the final drive arrangement is not done. But you get the jist of it.
